THE FIRST MEETING

  Hank: I learned a valuable lesson from that experience.I would never again rely on just my words to win the day.I would never again trust that I could simply scream my way out of situation.Words married with action, words without action are useless.

  Liza: I don't believe that. I dont think you really believe that either. Not everything calls for violence. You taught me that violence isn't always the answer.

  Hank: I didn't say violence. I said action. You have to do something. If you just sit on your hands, or just scream at the problem, you aren't doing anything. Action is required, even Dr King knew that to be true.

  Liza: Thanks preacher.Is the sermon done yet?

  Hank: Hold on Im just warming up.

  Liza: Hank Jefferson Montgomery. Focus. This is not a pulpit. This is a historical record. You were just attacked by a goverment robot. Thats where the history part of this left off. Can we get back to that?

  (Eyes locked) (The tension is thick, like grab me a whitehouse roll becuase grandma got that fresh churned butter and I want to lay it on...kinda thick)

  Hank: (huffs) I have very vague memories following the attack, flashes of moments, hazy images, sounds of screams, fragments of feelings but what I remember next is waking up in our house. The afternoon had turned to night, my eyes slowly adjusting, I tried to move but immediately threw up all over the living room floor. I don't mean to be graphic but I remember thinking as I was threwing up, how it is possible that I had this much liquid inside my body at any one time.

  Liza: Dad...

  Hank: Sorry, not good enough for the history books.... Fine, I'll do an edit on that kind of stuff next time.My body felt like it was fighting through jello for the next day and into the next. I tried to be helpful around the house but still felt woozy if I pushed myself to hard.I eventually got back up to full strength, but even to this day I will have random shocks of pain rip through my body and I blame it on that stupid robot.. At some point I asked your mother what happened after the bot attacked me... she never gave me a full answer.She was so strong, I think she didn't tell me things becuase she wanted to carry the full weight and not burden me.I was strong enough, I could have taken... Regardless, the most I ever got out of her was "I took care of it."Do you understand what that means? She must have lifted me off the ground, all 200 pounds of me. She had to be the one who got me into the car, then had to drive her passed out husband and baby girl home through a dangerous city and then to top it all off, what did she do about the bot?

  Liza: I'd like to imagine her taking the crowbar, jumping off the hood of the car and spiking that vile thing right through its mechanical heart.

  Hank: Thats my girl. Well then, lets say thats what happened. I love you. We are one.

  Liza: We are one. I love you too.

  Hank: (Tears up a little bit) (Gathers himself) (Continues)

  Once I was back to 90% we finished moving the grandparents into the guest room. It was just for a couple of days, thats what we kept telling ourselves. We were hoping that after a couple of days, worst case senario a couple of weeks, things would calm down…. but the opposite happened. Things got so bad so quickly.

  In order for me to tell some of this story I’m going to take a moment to describe our house. The house was pretty cool. It wasn't the best house but we got great advice and bought based on the location not the house itself.

  Now that Im thinking about it, I really loved that house. It had its quirks. The only house your mother and I could afford was a foreclosured fixer-upper. We put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that house. We spent hours, fixing floor tiles, painting walls, changing hardware and refinishing those hardwood floors... let me tell you.

  Liza: Tangent or pertinent?

  Hank: Pertinent. Kind of… you have to let me tell this story my way. Now where was I? Girl, you messed up my flow.

  Liza: Sorry. The house, where was it in the city?

  Hank: Right. Okay… The house was about a mile and a half from downtown in a little neighborhood on the Northside. But even there we had some natural boundaries that made our little corner feel even more intimate. There was a little forest that started right behind us that led down to some railroad tracks at the bottom of a ravine. The tracks ran all the way down into the city. There was a little stream that served as a tributary to the big river, it was just a 10 minute walk from us in the other direction. It felt like we had found a little haven. We had very little traffic in front of our house becuase it was nestled so deep into the back corner of our neighborhood. Our little slice of the pie.

  During the darkest days that house felt like an oasis in the wilderness... I remember in the first couple of days with your grandparents there, you could hear some of the sounds from downtown. Federal agents were doing everything they could to keep the streets clear. They had their growing army of bots to help them but they also employed old school tactics too like water cannons, tear gas, and concussion grenades. Those we could hear from the front porch, it sounded like actual bombs were going off in the middle of downtown. In our small city. We didn’t live in New York or LA, our small city and the AI wanted to stifle any spark of revolution anywhere. The images and videos that we were able to find left all of us with our mouths wide open, pure shock over what we were seeing. I’d seen stuff like this before on the news but it was always some far off place. Some distant place like Paris, Baghdad or Syria. It was a totally different experience knowing it was happening in your own backyard. It didn’t last to long before all digital communications were cut off or highly censored, media blackouts started, and the movements of people started being openly tracked by the AI using the network of cameras that we had already installed. We setup cameras on our houses, on our cars, and on our street corners all in the name of security. One day the AI decided that it wanted access to all those cameras and we were powerless to stop it. It used those cameras to track us, all of us, even the federal agents that served it. The news came back on but with new anchors and it only reported on world news and then any domestic news quickly turned into the AI propaganda. You had to go deep into social media forums and threads or used VPNs to find videos of the protests or real news of anything that was happening in our country.

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  Then there were the stories of home invasions. We spent more time on the front porch, and people would stop and tell you stories. The stories were all of the same kind of thing, small gangs, like the one that had attacked us, were growing and beginning to get more bold. Instead of just harrasing people on the street they were stepping up to home invasions. People told stories about how they would take valuables and torture the family if they were inside, and then leave by morning.

  "That was not going to happen to my family!" That was the thought running through my head when I heard those stories.So instead of just thinking it, I married it to action.I reached out to the only other man that I knew that could help me in this moment.

  Now, you know that Zeke lived across the street but I mean he lived right across the street. I could fire an arrow from the back door of my kitchen, out the front door, across the street, through his front door and it would sink into the back door of his kitchen. He lived in that neighborhood since he was a boy. That same house for 30 years. Nothing rattled Zeke, except the events of the past week. I’d never seen him like that before, visibly shaken. Zeke had never said anything to me except "yep" until a couple days ago but he always acknowledged me and was kind in his quiet demeanor.

  Zeke never came over to our house. He kept to himself and was never imposing. As the only white family on the block and only a handful of white families in the neighborhood, we were met with some skepticism when we first arrived, except for Zeke. It felt like Zeke saw us for what we were from the beginning, never judging. He was just quiet as he minded his flower beds.

  So it came as a little surprise to him when I saw him outside again that day, in his lawn chair with his gun. I walked across the street and asked him:

  Hank: Hey Zeke, you want to come over for dinner tonight?

  Zeke: Yep

  Hank: Dinner will be on the table at 6.

  Zeke: Yep

  Grandma did not like this at all. She was never really comfortable around strangers but especially, and she would never outright say this, but especially around black people. Growing up in the Jim Crow Era South, while she would never act on any racist thoughts, it manifests itself as a kind of blanket of mistrust and skepticism.

  When Zeke was in our home the mood was tense at first. Luckily you were there to fill any awkward silence that might have arisen during dinner. You always asked for stories during dinnertime. I guess old habits die hard…

  Liza: Dad keep going…

  Hank: Ok ok… Grandma took you up to bed and left Zeke, Pop, mom and me at the table. The table was an antique family heirloom. My grandfather, bought it when he owned a furniture store downtown. It was substantial and solid. we could have held the meeting standing on top of the thing and it would have been just fine. I loved that table, I grew up at that table and a lot of important decisions of my life were made at that table, even the final decision to leave it behind when it was time to go.

  The first meeting at the table really helped set the stage for everything that would soon follow. Zeke looked nervous at first still unsure about what we were going to talk about, yet he didn’t leave. He was a good man. I asked the dumb question first.

  Hank: Zeke, have you been keeping up with the news lately?

  Zeke: Ha Ha. Yes.

  Hank: What’s the news around the neighborhood? Is anyone experiencing that violence first hand?

  Zeke: Afraid so, couple houses broken into, which isn’t weird for around here except they’re not stealing anything. They’re just destroying the house. Louisa’s is the big house on the corner of Custer and Beaumont. She told me the story about how every plate, bowl, cup, everything was smashed all over her house. Every photo or painting on the wall ripped down and shredded or smashed. Then as a final touch they took spray paint to the walls and graffitied racist slurs all over the entire house.

  Just awful.

  That being said, that’s not even the scariest story I heard. That attack on Louisa's was clearly planned for a time when she wasn't home. Real talk, there was a home invasion a couple nights ago. Anthony, he lives in the grey house on the corner, he is still in the hospital from the injuries that he got trying to defend his family. I went to visit him and he said, it was him against 5 or 6 guys that broke into his house. They did horrible, unspeakable things to that poor family and they were gone by morning. They didn’t steal a thing, they came in that house just to fuck with them.

  (Stunned silence)

  Hank: That’s the kinda shit that scares me the most.

  Everyone at the table sat quietly for a few moments the air was buzzing. We were all scared and thinking millions of complicated thoughts. How do you get so many questions in your head and have answers to none of them?

  Hank: We have to work together. We have to band together.

  Pop: What are you suggesting?

  Beth: A neighborhood watch.

  Hank: Interesting, like make a network of people who are keeping tabs on things that are happening around the neighborhood?

  Zeke: Ok. I like it, I've got a few people I can get on board.

  Beth: Let’s take it a step further. What if we get people to sign up for front porch patrols. During that time slot, if we get enough people maybe it’s only a few hours, a couple of nights a week. The patrol sits on our front porch with a flashlight and an air horn and if they see anything they blast the horn and that will alert us to wake up and maybe that will detour whoever might be up to no good.

  Hank: I love it. Think people will go for it?

  Pop: Puts a lot of faith in your neighbors.

  Beth: We have to start building faith and trust somewhere. Might as well be in our own backyard.

  Zeke: I like the sentiment. Let’s see if we can sell this to some other people. I’ll make my visits tomorrow and see what the people think.

  Hank: That’s awesome. Good news, this is all just temporary. The world will right itself soon. Everything will go back to normal. You'll see.

  I wanted so desperately for these words to be true. I always tried to stay positive but we all felt the world crumbling beneath our feet and we knew we were powerless to stop it.

  At that point it was past dark and we all felt like it was time to settle in, before Zeke walked out the door he turned and said,

  Zeke: Shit. I can’t believe I almost forgot.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a plain white envelope.

  Zeke: A young man came by your house yesterday while I was sitting out in the yard. He asked me to hand deliver this to you. Anyway. Goodnight.

  Hank: Thank you and goodnight.

  Holding the letter in my hand I looked to Pop then your mother. My hands were shaking. I knew immediately who the letter was from.

  Grandma came down the stairs and locked eyes with all of us.

  Grandma: What?

  I just held up the letter.

  Grandma: Who’s it from?

  I handed her the letter to open. She did it with little hesitation. None of us had to read it to know who it was from. That handwriting was unmistakable, and his flourished signature jumped off the page.

  It was a letter from my brother Jack. He was alive and he wanted to see us.